Related papers: Synthetically Controlled Bandits
This thesis studies the exploration and exploitation trade-off in online learning of properties of quantum states using multi-armed bandits. Given streaming access to an unknown quantum state, in each round we select an observable from a…
Sequential design of experiments for optimizing a reward function in causal systems can be effectively modeled by the sequential design of interventions in causal bandits (CBs). In the existing literature on CBs, a critical assumption is…
Model selection in supervised learning provides costless guarantees as if the model that best balances bias and variance was known a priori. We study the feasibility of similar guarantees for cumulative regret minimization in the stochastic…
This paper studies regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit. It is well known that side information, such as the prior distribution of arm means in Thompson sampling, can improve the statistical efficiency of the bandit algorithm. While…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandits enable agents to adapt to changing environments by incorporating mechanisms to detect and respond to shifts in reward distributions, making them well-suited for dynamic settings. However, existing…
Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…
Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular and earliest algorithms to solve stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. We consider a variant of TS, named $\alpha$-TS, where we use a fractional or $\alpha$-posterior ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…
This note introduce three Bayesian style Multi-armed bandit algorithms: Information-directed sampling, Thompson Sampling and Generalized Thompson Sampling. The goal is to give an intuitive explanation for these three algorithms and their…
We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…
We investigate the extent to which offline demonstration data can improve online learning. It is natural to expect some improvement, but the question is how, and by how much? We show that the degree of improvement must depend on the quality…
This paper studies the Bayesian regret of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for bandit problems, building on the information-theoretic framework introduced by Russo and Van Roy (2015). Specifically, it extends the rate-distortion analysis of…
We study the multi-objective linear contextual bandit problem, where multiple possible conflicting objectives must be optimized simultaneously. We propose \texttt{MOL-TS}, the \textit{first} Thompson Sampling algorithm with Pareto regret…
There has been a recent surge of interest in nonparametric bandit algorithms based on subsampling. One drawback however of these approaches is the additional complexity required by random subsampling and the storage of the full history of…
We address the problem of stochastic combinatorial semi-bandits, where a player selects among P actions from the power set of a set containing d base items. Adaptivity to the problem's structure is essential in order to obtain optimal…
In this work, we study sequential choice bandits with feedback. We propose bandit algorithms for a platform that personalizes users' experience to maximize its rewards. For each action directed to a given user, the platform is given a…
Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…
Scientific experimentation is largely driven by statistical hypothesis testing to determine significant differences in interventions. Traditionally, experimenters allocate samples uniformly between each intervention. However, such an…
Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…
A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…
Thompson sampling is one of the most widely used algorithms for many online decision problems, due to its simplicity in implementation and superior empirical performance over other state-of-the-art methods. Despite its popularity and…